The Second Wives’ Crusade : Those Men. They Get Married and Start a Family. Then There’s That Messy Divorce. They Get Married Again, and the Second Wife Wants What the First Wife Had. See Where We’re Headed Here?

A hush falls over the 60 women at a rally of ex-wives on a grassy field behind the Federal Building in Westwood. A 5-year-old girl at the podium haltingly recites a poem addressed to her father. She asks why he doesn’t send money anymore. The women in the crowd, clutching their children and flickering candles in Dixie cups this balmy night, are there to call for enforcement of child-support laws against ex-husbands they say are uncaring about their own children.

But as the vigil proceeds, the group is ringed by a dozen women from the Coalition of Parent Support, California’s largest fathers’ rights group, who have heard aboutthe demonstration and rallied their own troops to challenge it. “That’s child abuse! That’s child abuse!” screams Laura Ross about the use of the youngster to bring home the ex-wives’ point. Ross is a member of COPS and is married to one of the divorced or separated men the 5-year-old is indirectly maligning. She angrily waves a sign that says “Second Family-Second Class.” Another COPS member planted next to Ross calls the ex-wives “money grubbers” who use child support money “to live high on the hog” and impoverish ex-husbands and their second families.

Two of the ex-wives turn toward Ross. “Be quiet!” snarls one, clenching her fist inches from Ross’ face. “You are a low life,” hisses the other.

Ross, a legal secretary, stubbornly holds her ground. “Fathers are paying more than they can afford,” she snaps back. Ross resentfully recounts how child-support increases have made bearing a child with her new husband prohibitively expensive. The couple can barely muster rent on a one-bedroom apartment, she says. Meanwhile, Ross believes her husband’s ex has used a child-support increase to enlarge her breasts.

(Sherena Traxler says her new husband paid for the $5,000 procedure. It is ludicrous, Traxler says, to think she’d have anything left from $350 a month in child-support payments that barely cover his share of raising their 6-year-old daughter.)

Welcome to the down-and-dirty war of the wives. Feminists recoil at this hateful women-on-women skirmish, but these confrontations are becoming more common as second wives emerge as the most vociferous foot soldiers in the flourishing “fathers’ rights” movement that has mushroomed to nearly 300 groups nationwide.

Of course, deadebeat dads abound. Nearly 57% of parents who don’t have custody of their children pay no child support. Even those who are paying aren’t providing their proportional share of the true cost of raising a child, studies show.

But for the women struggling to raise families, whether they are first wives with children from a failed relationship or second wives with their own families, a venemous battle has evolved over the relative rights of each in splitting a squeezed resource: the man’s paycheck. And the war reverberates from state legislatures to family law courts around the country, with troubling implications for judges who must weigh what is best for America’s children. It has become particularly fierce in California, where, judges say, declining wages make it increasingly hard to support one family, let alone two.

“I know I make orders and I can’t imagine how the father will pay it and how the mother will live on what she gets,” says Los Angeles Superior Court Commissioner Robert Schnider, who, like other judges, must now largely adhere to state guidelines that calculate payments based on both parents’ incomes and how much time the court has granted each with their children. On several occasions, men in Schnider’s courtroom have pleaded that child-support orders will force them to live out of their cars. “We are just dishing out relatively equal levels of unfairness and impossibility.”

To the flag-bearers of groups such as COPS--many of them second wives--the amount of child support some men are ordered to pay discriminates against the second or third families. A husband’s high payments, they say, deprive them of a God-given right: to have a family with their new partner. Worse, court awards to children of first marriages are taking food out of the mouths of children of second marriages. “Why are the first wife’s children more important than mine?” COPS member Diane Santos Jaussaud asks.

Proponents of tougher child-support laws have a ready answer: a man’s primary responsibility is to his first family. If he can’t afford to support his first family, they say, he shouldn’t indulge in another.

Yet while politicians call for greater personal responsibility by fathers, second wives’ tearful testimony has moved legislators in half a dozen states, not including California, to pass laws that allow fathers to deduct second-marriage child-rearing costs before a court can calculate support to children from a first marriage. In California, where three of six bills sponsored by COPS passed last year, second wives successfully pushed legislation that no longer allows judges to routinely include the new wives’ income in court calculations of how much the husbands can pay. Second wives also helped defeat a proposed law to extend parents’ child support obligations for educational purposes by three years, or until a son or daughter turns 21. Now COPS is mounting its greatest push, lobbying for legislation that would revise the child-support formula and, in effect, slash child support by 25%.

“The courts treat dads as if they are sperm donors and walking wallets,” says Roberta Hopkins-Brown, 35, a home day-care provider and second wife who is co-director of the COPS San Bernardino chapter. While men are expected to stay employed and keep child support flowing, she says, “first wives have given birth to the golden calf. This is their financial security until the child turns 18.”

Hopkins-Brown, who has a 3-year-old son, Robert, with her new husband, is a slim woman whose living room table is piled with reports she’ll use to testify before the California Senate. “They get money from this man--they don’t have to sleep with him or wash his dirty underwear. Then they remarry and get some more money from the second man!”

Second wives’ calculated and visible leadership role is aimed directly at legislators’ heartstrings. “It’s a tactical decision,” says Orange County COPS board member Susan Dierolt, whose chapter sends women to lobby legislators--preferably with their children in tow. Dierolt, a teacher, includes pictures of her 7-month-old son in letters to Assembly members.

Last year, second wives from the COPS group pasted pictures of their children onto blue balloons, then traveled to Sacramento, where they left hundreds of the balloons in legislators’ offices--a strategy they plan to try again in January. Hundreds of COPS members also packed the Assembly’s Judiciary Committee chambers during critical hearings. And many picketed the Los Angeles offices of the National Organization for Women with signs reading: “Second wives are women, too.” They staged protests outside courthouses in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties, and held walkathons while they carried signs proclaiming, “Honk if you think you are paying too much child support.”

“Women’s groups say we are a bunch of sniveling men who don’t want to pay child support,” says San Bernardino COPS member Mike Weening. “Legislators see our women and realize there is more to it than that.”

The crusade by COPS second wives, first wives say, is just a smoke screen for dads who don’t want to pay. And the support payments themselves, many who study child support contend, are pitifully low. The average non-custodial father earns $28,900 to $38,600; the average woman due child support receives $2,252, a 1994 study by the Center for Law and Social Policy found. That figure is less than half the annual amount a 1993 U.S. Department of Agriculture report found it costs single low-income parents to raise a child between the ages of 6 and 8. “Dads are paying way, way too little,” says Irv Garfinkel, a Columbia University professor of social work, who estimates most absent dads can pay 2.5 to 3 times more than their orders require.

To feminists, the split between women on child support is a wrenching repeat of divisions that have surfaced on other gender issues. Women often lead protests by anti-abortion groups on health clinics. In 1991, many black women supported then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas in allegations he sexually harassed law professor Anita Hill.

“It doesn’t surprise me that women are put out in front on this. It’s like having a black, [University of California Regent] Ward Connerly, attack affirmative action in the university system. It’s harder to argue with,” says Susan Faludi, author of “Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women” and of a forthcoming book about men and fathers’ rights. “So many women still depend on men for their financial and social sustenance, there will always be women who are willing to play that role.”

“It’s the same reason a man charged with rape will hire a woman lawyer to represent him,” says Kim Gandy, executive vice president of NOW. Gandy believes that fathers’ enhanced legal rights have already given men a bigger bargaining chip and adversely affected children by convincing women that they must negotiate away higher support payments, the house or other possessions to ensure they get custody of the children.

Deborah Rhode, a Stanford University law professor and former director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, warns second wives that their fight with other women is, at best, shortsighted. “Wife No. 2,” Rhode says, “might find herself in the same circumstances as wife No. 1.”

*

The second wives’ movement potentially could affect millions. A third of all Americans marry, divorce and remarry, and half of those have second families, says Columbia University’s Garfinkel. Taxpayers feel the tug of war, too; almost half of the 15.5 million children in families headed by a single parent received some kind of federal public assistance in 1989, a RAND report said, and some experts believe any curtailment in child support only nudges more women onto welfare rolls.

The birth three years ago of COPS was provoked by more judges’ tendency to include second spouses’ income in calculations of how much child support their new husbands should pay. But what most riled California’s second wives was a 1992 state law that boosted payments by 25%. For women who had already had children with their new husbands based on the amount of his old child-support order, this was a heavy blow. California, by one account, jumped from 49th to fourth in average per capita child support ordered. Many COPS parents suddenly saw payments double, even triple, as courts began calling them in to modify old orders that had been untouched for years. At least hundreds of thousands of California parents--mostly men--still face such court modifications.

Some second wives are also rebelling at the recent crackdown on deadbeat parents. In some cases, the government has intercepted tax refunds and portions of unemployment payments and put liens on property to get deadbeats to pay up. California now employs its Franchise Tax Board--it will also yank professional as well as drivers’ licenses--to pursue those in arrears. Meanwhile, Congress is considering legislation to put child-support collections in the hands of the Internal Revenue Service.

In 1992, second wife Lori Sanders-Crabb sat in a Bakersfield courtroom, growing outraged as she heard a judge invoke California’s new guidelines to more than triple her husband’s monthly child support payments for one child to $642. Sanders-Crabb rushed out of the courthouse, wrote up a petition to repeal the new law and collected 50,000 signatures from a table in a neighborhood park, effectively launching COPS. The group swiftly grew to 4,000 members, initially tapping mostly white, angry, Republican men and their new spouses, says co-founder Dave Whitman. Today, three of five members of the COPS executive board are women.

At a monthly meeting of the COPS San Bernardino chapter at the Elks Lodge in Riverside, the crowd, like the group’s current membership, is roughly half men and half women. Second wives who arrive, many carrying babies, say they pray for one another’s pending court cases as well as changes in child-support laws. They cry together when hard-fought bills die. For the cash-strapped, the group is a place to exchange toys and clothing. Often, COPS monthly meetings provide an emotional outlet for members who believe child support, visitation and custody fights are ripping their lives apart.

“The main thing people are blaming for societal problems today is what?” bellows Jack Woolworth, a counselor and specialist on fathers’ relationships with children, who serves as this meeting’s speaker.

“MEN!!” several women in the crowd shout back at the bearded, portly man.

“The court system stinks!” says Woolworth, his booming voice filling the Elks lodge as he explains how the courts pull men away from children and award custody to the women.

“Amen!” retorts a COPS member from the back row.

“We are told we are just supposed to bring home the paychecks. I am telling you that is garbage!” Woolworth says. Women dig into their purses and drop $5 and $10 offerings into a straw basket to aid lobbying efforts.

COPS members also comb courthouses for new recruits, swelling membership. On a sunny fall morning, a trio of women bounds up the stairs to the third floor of the San Bernardino County Courthouse. San Bernardino chapter board member Irene Villalpando maneuvers her tiny frame through the jammed hallways, methodically working the 60 people who sit on wooden benches nervously waiting to be called by the judge. She presses blue flyers about COPS into their hands.

Meanwhile, Terry Cook stands guard at the top of the stairs, accosting new arrivals. “Hey, you going to family law court?” says Cook, a plump blond woman sporting coral lipstick. Later, Cook works a line of jurors, then singles out sheriffs escorting prisoners. “Hi, you guys! You all divorced?” Cook cheerfully chirps. She peers into courtrooms she has never been allowed to enter. Stepparents, she notes, have few rights in the legal process, being virtually locked out of court custody and child-support decisions. “I wanted to strike back at his ex, the judge, the system,” says Cook, a Riverside nurse and COPS member. “They don’t care about you. They don’t care if you are the angel or the devil.”

*

“It was like a ton of bricks coming down on us,” says Irene Villalpando, quietly sobbing as she recalls her disbelief when a judge in 1992 increased her husband’s payments for his sons, Aaron, 15, and Eric, 10, to roughly half his wages as a meat cutter. The judge included a quarter of Irene’s earnings in determining how much her husband, Fred, could pay. The result, Irene says, has been $24,000 in credit card debts and a dim future in their tiny, $359-a-month apartment near the railroad tracks.

First wife Dolores divorced Fred in 1987 after finding him romping in bed with another woman. “Fred,” she scrawled on the walls of their San Bernardino home, after hacking their bed to bits with an ax, “if I ever see you again, I’ll kill you.” She set his clothing and shoes on fire in the back yard. Dolores would eventually use the 1992 California law to take Fred back to court to increase his monthly payments from $380 to $963.

That’s when Irene, a clerical worker, began to seethe. Two children, Irene figures, can’t cost that much. Irene and Fred had to move from a house into a bachelor apartment too small to hold a bed. The couple sleep on blankets spread over the room’s soiled beige carpet. Worse, says 36-year-old Irene, the increased child-support payments robbed her of the chance to have children with Fred.

While Irene says she and Fred struggle to come up with money to buy tires for their car, Fred’s first wife, Dolores, drives a 1990 Jeep Cherokee, owns a three-bedroom home, and vacations in Jamaica.

Dolores, who earns about $30,000 as a clerical worker for a grocery store chain, says Fred and Irene can afford to pay $11,556 a year on their combined income of $62,600. The principal reason her lifestyle is more comfortable than Irene’s? Frugality and hard work, not child support payments, Dolores says, adding that she rented one bedroom of a house she shared with seven others in order to amass the down payment for a home. A friend, she notes, paid for the Jamaica vacation. Often, the boys subsisted on rice and beans, and mounting debts pushed Dolores to seek the child-support increase. It is an amount she judges fair considering the cost of raising the boys, and it allows her to provide what every parent wants to give theirkids: new shoes, haircuts and the athletic gear needed to play on the school football team.

“When they got married, Irene knew Fred had two sons,” says the petite woman, angrily pushing dark wisps of hair from her face. “He needs to pay to help raise these children. These children were both planned.”

Dolores calls a court request for custody filed by Fred in 1992 a ploy to stop paying child support. Aaron, embarrassed, agrees. The boy vividly recalls how his father laid out overdue bills on his apartment coffee table three years ago. “He said he was going broke and that mom was doing this to him. He said if I lived with him, this wouldn’t be happening to him,” says Aaron, remembering how tears streaked down his face as he raced back to his mother’s home.

While it is theif plights that have galvanized the women of COPS, the men frequently have to be dragged to meetings, where they are soon exposed to stories similar to theirs. “In some ways, it made our relationship stronger. We had a common enemy,” says COPS San Bernardino chapter president Marjory Montgomery, a stout, red-haired woman.

Montgomery watched as a 1991 court hearing nearly doubled her husband Ed’s child-support payments to $1,011 a month, about 60% of his income. Support for Ed’s three children--now reduced because only one child is a minor--increased in part because Ed’s ex-wife was not employed, having chosen to stay home with a young child and get vocational training. “Kids are expensive. But this is back-door alimony!” says Marjory, a quality assurance software manager, who says first wives should be forced to work outside the home.

Ed’s first wife, Nancy Montgomery, says that shortly after the order, her ex-husband began falling behind in payments and is now more thanF $10,000 in arrears, which auuthorities confirm. She says that even before the order she was struggling to make ends meet, and that the district attorney’s office garnished Ed’s wages after he didn’t make payments.

Ironically, fueling some second wives’ sense of injustice is the fact that many never received child support for children from their first marriages. Worse, child support is based on the relative income of the father and the mother. So if a first wife decides to stay at home with the children, the father’s payments shoot up, sometimes forcing the second wife to abandon time with her own children to work outside the home. Lori Sanders-Crabb, 33, switched from part-time to full-time work as a dental assistant when her husband’s child support increased. The biggest losers are their children, 9-year-old Trevor and 4-year-old Chelsea. “Their needs went unmet,” she says. “I blame the system for that.”

Jessie Cohen of Palmdale says three friends in her Antelope Valley COPS chapter had abortions, because they believed child-support demands on their husbands made it impossible to have children.

For chapter co-founder Val Parmenter, the bitterness swelled as she realized that she was being asked to help support children from her husband’s previous marriage when her own 21-year-old son hadn’t received child support from his birth father. When Val, who works pin-striping cars, married her third husband, Dennis Parmenter, a quarter of her income was used in child-support calculations for Dennis’ four children from his first wife, Elizabeth. Soon after Val’s honeymoon with Dennis, the payments increased from $800 to $1700, consuming 78% of Dennis’ net income and virtually ensuring that they could no longer afford community college for her son, who was then 19. (The payments were reduced to $272 a month when Val and Dennis were laid off from jobs with the city of Corona and had to take lower-paying work.) “What does she contribute?” Val snarls.

“I don’t buy any clothes for myself. I give up everything to try to make a life for the kids,” says first wife Elizabeth, adding that her salary and child support barely cover the essentials, and that she pays the $240-a-month health insurance bills for the children. She resents Val’s participation in COPS. The group, she says, “prolongs the pain of divorce. It hurts our family.”

Many of the second wives’ husbands say that while they agree with COPS objectives, they are removed from the fathers’ rights movement--preferring to distance themselves from bitter divorces and the pain of strained, superficial relations with children they no longer see daily. When Dennis Parmenter was married to his wife of 16 years, “I changed the diapers. I was there for them when they were born. I did it all.” (His ex-wife confirms this).

When his ex-wife got custody of the children and he was granted visits every other weekend, he felt a part of him had been amputated. “When I got hit, I sat in bed and cried and withdrew. She picked up the phone and got busy,” Dennis says, wrapping his arm around Val’s shoulder.

*

First wives like Charleen Bonney are enraged by the second wives’ success. Bonney, a member of the San Fernando Valley chapter of the Assn. for Children for Enforcement of Support, says her case is typical. Her husband left her after a 10-year marriage. She was four months pregnant and had a 1-year-old son. Her ex-husband remarried and had seven more children. After his second marriage, authorities say, child-support payments became sporadic; in the last three years, he has fallen more than $20,000 in arrears and was briefly jailed for non-payment in 1993.

“Why should my two not get child support because he’s been irresponsible and had six more kids?” asks Bonney, a human resources director for a Santa Monica firm. “After the divorce is over, something happens. It’s out of sight, out of mind.” Part of California’s child support formula, she hastens to add, allows judges to make some financial allowances for children of subsequent families.

COPS second wives don’t see that as enough. They are lobbying to peg child support to the “true cost” of raising the child, not an automatic percentage of their husband’s income. (The most common formula nationwide charges 18% to 24% of net income for one child; 28% to 37% for two; 35% to 46% for three).

They are demanding greater gender equity in a court system they believe is unabashedly biased in favor of mothers in visitation and custody matters. The law says no gender should be favored, yet in 1993, only 14.3% of children from divorced families were living with their father, U.S. Census data shows. Even in hotly contested custody cases, mom gets her custodial wishes twice as often as dad, a Stanford University study of 1,123 divorced families in two California counties found.

Fathers can’t continue to be relegated to “Disneyland Daddies”--often granted visits every other weekend, second wives add. Rather than resort to increasingly punitive enforcement measures, they say, more fathers would pay child support if dads were given more time with their children. (Nine in 10 fathers with joint custody pay their support, but only 44.5% of those without visitation or custody rights make payments, federal data shows.)

California Sen. Charles Calderon (D-Whittier), among COPS’ staunchest supporters, has introduced legislation to require district attorneys to enforce visitation, much as they now enforce child support. “Many [first] wives try to keep men from the kids,” says COPS San Bernardino member Mike Weening, found guilty last year on nine counts of contempt after failing for nine months to pay child support for his three children. “It gets to the point that you won’t pay for a brand new truck you can’t drive.”

Government, COPS’ wives add, must be forced to stop favoring first wives. A father who loses his job must hire a lawyer to help revise his child-support payments downward; a mother who believes her ex-husband’s income has risen need only turn to the district attorney for free help.

While crediting COPS with “changing the whole political atmosphere in Sacramento” and giving fathers’ rights a powerful voice, Los Angeles Superior Court Commissioner Schnider has little sympathy for their desire to dock child support to the first family to favor second families. “If you have four kids and don’t have the money to afford them, I won’t cut you a lot of slack when you have the fifth and sixth kid with a second wife,” says the commissioner, who says fathers’ rights groups picket his courthouse and monitor cases from the back of his courtroom. “When you have a battle of two innocents, you cannot make a decision that is fair to everyone.”

California Assemblywoman Sheila Kuehl (D--Santa Monica) wants to blunt COPS’ crusade by introducing a bill that would increase child support and--similar to measures in Minnesota, Washington and West Virginia--require that judges give an edge in contested custody cases to whoever was the primary caretaker of the children during the marriage. Usually, that’s the wife.

Contrary to second wives’ claims, most second families paying child support fare better financially than first families who receive it, a study by the American Bar Assn. Center on Children and the Law found. Even in families where the divorced parents have joint physical custody, the mother and the children were living at 60% of their standard of living before the divorce, a Stanford University study found. The father’s economic picture had improved since the divorce, even when counting child and spousal support payments.

Because non-custodial parents--mostly men--in California are granted a discount on child support based on the amount of visitation time, the push for more visitation is often just a ploy to pay less, advocates of tougher child-support laws say. Indeed, most men, the groups add, display an eerie post-divorce detachment from their flesh-and-blood. Nearly 30% of children didn’t see their father at all in the past year, and almost two-thirds saw him only a few times during the year, a 1991 University of Wisconsin study of 13,017 divorced families found. “Far too many fathers are fading from their children’s lives even if the wives want them to visit,” says Johns Hopkins University public policy professor and divorce expert Andrew Cherlin.

Tina Leisner of COPS San Fernando Valley sees little of this as she stands at the candlelight vigil in Westwood, clasping a sign on which she has scrawled “2nd kids need support, too.” Leisner, 34, five months pregnant, says, “You can’t tell these men that they can’t have a family and express their love because they blew it once!” Leisner, a legal secretary, says her husband, a postman, delivers a third of his take-home pay to three children from a previous marriage. Leisner’s eyes widen and her muscles tense at the suggestion that second wives shouldn’t have children. “My child,” she says, stroking her swollen belly, “is the forgotten child.”